This essay is an exclusive feature from the inaugural issue of The India Way- 'Unquiet Neighbourhood: What is the future of South Asia?'
About the Author: Nishkalp Shukla
A fourth-year BA (Hons.) Political Science student at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, Nishkalp's academic interests span law, policy, gender, and international relations, with a focus on legal fields that safeguard rights and lived experiences.
Since the bloody partition of 1947, which birthed two nations with antagonistic identities, India and Pakistan have been locked in an existential rivalry where history, religion, and geopolitics intertwine. In this volatile equation, Kashmir, the epicentre of this perennial discord, remains an unresolved trauma, reignited by every skirmish and terrorist attack. By 2025, this century-old hostility has crossed a critical threshold. In South Asia’s fraught security landscape, nuclear doctrines are dangerously loosening, confidence-building mechanisms are eroding, and strategic alliances are deepening regional polarisation. It has thus become imperative to rethink South Asian security paradigms. This analysis provides a comprehensive examination of current dynamics and proposes pathways to prevent a regional conflagration with potentially devastating consequences. However one frames it, the situation remains precarious and risks spiralling—a globalised world is not immune to such a clash.
Rooted in decades of unresolved rivalry, the conflict has crystallised around Kashmir. A disputed territory, identity symbol, military flashpoint, and diplomatic lever. Thus, the recent developments, however, reveal a qualitative shift in this fault line. The April Pahalgam attack, which killed 26 civilians, dramatically reignited tensions. India accused Pakistan of backing the perpetrators, linked to the Resistance Front and Lashkar-e-Taiba. In response, New Delhi suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, closed the Attari-Wagah border crossing, and launched targeted strikes into Pakistan’s Punjab, shattering the implicit restraint that had prevailed since the 1999 Kargil War.
This near-catastrophic confrontation epitomises the India-Pakistan strategic standoff. Triggered by Pakistani troops infiltrating Kargil’s high-altitude terrain, the conflict escalated into a war of attrition marked by positional battles and heavy casualties. This first war between declared nuclear powers exposed the fragility of ceasefire line control and the doctrinal instability on both sides. At the request of the Pakistani president, U.S. President Bill Clinton intervened directly. His involvement proved decisive, as the National Command Authority held substantial influence over political decisions. Under this pressure, Islamabad was ultimately forced to proceed with a unilateral withdrawal. Yet Kargil remains a case study in how localized crises can escalate into strategic shocks with real nuclear risks. In 2025, that threshold has been crossed, combining limited conventional warfare, asymmetric operations, information warfare, and identity-driven mobilization.
If Kargil exemplified high-attrition warfare, exposing porous borders and strike doctrine instability, today’s conflict cycle is far more diffuse. Following the Pahalgam attack, India launched Operation Sindoor, targeting alleged terrorist infrastructure. Pakistan retaliated with cross-border shelling, drone shoot-down claims, and cognitive warfare targeting India’s Muslim minorities. This is no longer a frontal war but a fragmented, hybrid confrontation spanning cyber, media, and psychological domains—a destabilizing evolution that complicates crisis management exponentially.
With doctrines shrouded in ambiguity, hybrid escalation on the rise, and no credible mediator in sight, the subcontinent drifts into profound strategic instability.
Beyond military posturing, this fault line has fueled decades of intellectual confrontation between Indian and Pakistani strategists, each crafting narratives on legitimacy, deterrence, and national security. On India’s side, former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon advocates credible minimum deterrence while questioning the no-first-use nuclear orthodoxy. Conversely, General Khalid Kidwai, architect of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, frames atomic weapons as tools of preemptive stabilization. This doctrinal face-off sustains structural distrust, with each side interpreting the other’s signals as aggression preludes. The lack of a shared strategic lexicon or codified thresholds amplifies cognitive asymmetry. Thus, the India-Pakistan crisis becomes a war of ideas as much as a military standoff, where doctrinal concepts like pre-emptive strike, massive retaliation, and undeclared thresholds, act as potential crisis accelerants.
This doctrinal gap—pitting India’s hierarchical deterrence against Pakistan’s tactical flexibility—fuels an environment clouded by what Clausewitz termed the ‘fog of war’, where perception often overrides reality. Compounding this opacity is Thomas Schelling’s theorized dynamic: escalation risks arise not from intent to harm but from misread deterrence signals.
The absence of convergence on nuclear thresholds, combined with asymmetric postures, renders military signal interpretation highly volatile. Routine exercises or deployments risk being misread as offensive preparation. Without agreements on alert postures or direct communication, signal decoding itself becomes a tension multiplier. Military history teaches that perceived vulnerability or advantage can trigger uncontrollable spirals. In South Asia, this dynamic is magnified by structural asymmetries in strategic decision-making. Pakistan’s power architecture—centralized under the military-dominated National Command Authority (NCA)—grants the army autonomous strategic latitude, as illustrated by the 1999 Kargil operation launched without Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s full coordination. India, conversely, relies on a civilian-military hierarchy where the National Security Council and political executive retain final authority, as seen in the tightly controlled 2019 Balakot surgical strikes. This command contrast sustains a thick strategic fog: India calibrates signals under political oversight, while Pakistan’s unpredictability heightens misinterpretation risks.
This divergence stems from power imbalances. Doctrines reflect real and perceived capabilities. The imbalance between India’s conventional superiority and Pakistan’s asymmetric logic shapes their strategic choices.
Militarily, India holds clear dominance. With 1.4 million troops, 4,200+ tanks (T-90, Arjun Mk1), 680+ combat aircraft (Su-30MKI, Rafale), and a carrier- and nuclear-submarine equipped navy, its operational nuclear triad underscores conventional-nuclear synergy. Pakistan, with 650,000 personnel, leans on pre-emptive deterrence. Its 160-warhead arsenal, Nasr/Shaheen-II/Ghauri missiles, and deliberately ambiguous ‘first-use’ doctrine aim to offset conventional inferiority. However, this opacity, intended as a form of deterrence, increases the risk of misinterpretation. Islamabad’s hybrid reliance on non-state actors further destabilizes. Threshold breaches thus hinge not just on political intent but on how asymmetrically each side reads adversarial capabilities.
This doctrinal rift, rooted in asymmetric power and threat perceptions, reflects not just divergent deterrence philosophies but clashing cognitive frameworks. As doctrines grow flexible and less verifiable, strategic signal management frays, heightening misread risks. It is within this grey zone, both doctrinal and psychological, that South Asia’s deterrence architecture now encounters its most critical vulnerabilities. Amid strategic uncertainty, alliances gain critical importance. Beyond mere military pacts, they reshape power balances through regional influence, tech transfers, and containment strategies. India has built a strategic network transcending traditional partnerships to counterbalance China. As a Quad member (with the U.S., Japan, and Australia), it bolsters Indo-Pacific posture, complemented by defence ties with France (Scorpène submarines, Rafales) and Israel (drones, cyber, and missile defence). This tech-sharing, strategy-aligned architecture enhances India’s geopolitical depth and conventional deterrence against hybrid threats. Pakistan remains anchored to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Belt and Road Initiative’s crown jewel. Beyond granting China Indian Ocean access via Gwadar, CPEC traverses Gilgit-Baltistan—a region India claims as part of Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi views CPEC as a territorial provocation and Sino-Pakistani entrenchment. Islamabad also nurtures ties with Turkey, Iran, and Gulf states, blending security, ideology, and regionalism.
Moreover, Pakistan’s security posture no longer confines itself to defensive deterrence or operations within its borders. In 2024, Pakistani airstrikes conducted in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Khost, reportedly in response to alleged jihadist incursions, marked a doctrinal shift toward asserting extraterritorial strike capabilities. These operations, justified by a perceived threat and executed without prior regional coordination, set a troubling precedent.
However, the Bajwa Doctrine, led by former Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa, aimed to prioritise economic stabilisation and regional integration, all while maintaining the military’s dominant influence over national policy. Despite framing economic partnerships (e.g., China, Gulf states) as tools to reduce India-centric rivalry, it failed to transform core conflict dynamics. Pakistan’s military retains control over Kashmir and nuclear policy, perpetuating distrust. While conciliatory rhetoric emerged, armed tensions persist, exposing economic initiatives’ inability to override territorial, identity, and security drivers. This modernisation security rigidity underscores hybrid strategy limits, where historical fractures and strategic calculus still trump de-escalation.
In short, Indian and Pakistani military doctrines embody antithetical deterrence visions. India’s ‘massive retaliation’ doctrine clings (officially) to no-first-use; Pakistan’s ‘first-use’ posture banks on ambiguity as a stabiliser. This gap raises persistent questions: How far will India stretch deterrence? How does Pakistan interpret limited incursions?
In this unstable deterrence architecture, nuclear weapons act as uncertainty multipliers, exacerbated by decision-making dynamics. Pakistan’s current Army Chief, General Asim Munir, embodies a more offensive line, contrasting with past military caution. Even limited Indian incursions could be seen as justifying tactical nuclear use. Absent bilateral de-escalation channels or strategic off-ramps, unpredictability grows. Meanwhile, external powers (U.S., China, the UN) remain passive, urging restraint without crisis mediation.
Rooted in decades of unresolved rivalry, the conflict has crystallised around Kashmir. A disputed territory, identity symbol, military flashpoint, and diplomatic lever. Thus, the recent developments, however, reveal a qualitative shift in this fault line. The April Pahalgam attack, which killed 26 civilians, dramatically reignited tensions. India accused Pakistan of backing the perpetrators, linked to the Resistance Front and Lashkar-e-Taiba. In response, New Delhi suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, closed the Attari-Wagah border crossing, and launched targeted strikes into Pakistan’s Punjab, shattering the implicit restraint that had prevailed since the 1999 Kargil War.
This near-catastrophic confrontation epitomises the India-Pakistan strategic standoff. Triggered by Pakistani troops infiltrating Kargil’s high-altitude terrain, the conflict escalated into a war of attrition marked by positional battles and heavy casualties. This first war between declared nuclear powers exposed the fragility of ceasefire line control and the doctrinal instability on both sides. At the request of the Pakistani president, U.S. President Bill Clinton intervened directly. His involvement proved decisive, as the National Command Authority held substantial influence over political decisions. Under this pressure, Islamabad was ultimately forced to proceed with a unilateral withdrawal. Yet Kargil remains a case study in how localized crises can escalate into strategic shocks with real nuclear risks. In 2025, that threshold has been crossed, combining limited conventional warfare, asymmetric operations, information warfare, and identity-driven mobilization.
If Kargil exemplified high-attrition warfare, exposing porous borders and strike doctrine instability, today’s conflict cycle is far more diffuse. Following the Pahalgam attack, India launched Operation Sindoor, targeting alleged terrorist infrastructure. Pakistan retaliated with cross-border shelling, drone shoot-down claims, and cognitive warfare targeting India’s Muslim minorities. This is no longer a frontal war but a fragmented, hybrid confrontation spanning cyber, media, and psychological domains—a destabilizing evolution that complicates crisis management exponentially.
With doctrines shrouded in ambiguity, hybrid escalation on the rise, and no credible mediator in sight, the subcontinent drifts into profound strategic instability.
Beyond military posturing, this fault line has fueled decades of intellectual confrontation between Indian and Pakistani strategists, each crafting narratives on legitimacy, deterrence, and national security. On India’s side, former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon advocates credible minimum deterrence while questioning the no-first-use nuclear orthodoxy. Conversely, General Khalid Kidwai, architect of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, frames atomic weapons as tools of preemptive stabilization. This doctrinal face-off sustains structural distrust, with each side interpreting the other’s signals as aggression preludes. The lack of a shared strategic lexicon or codified thresholds amplifies cognitive asymmetry. Thus, the India-Pakistan crisis becomes a war of ideas as much as a military standoff, where doctrinal concepts like pre-emptive strike, massive retaliation, and undeclared thresholds, act as potential crisis accelerants.
This doctrinal gap—pitting India’s hierarchical deterrence against Pakistan’s tactical flexibility—fuels an environment clouded by what Clausewitz termed the ‘fog of war’, where perception often overrides reality. Compounding this opacity is Thomas Schelling’s theorized dynamic: escalation risks arise not from intent to harm but from misread deterrence signals.
The absence of convergence on nuclear thresholds, combined with asymmetric postures, renders military signal interpretation highly volatile. Routine exercises or deployments risk being misread as offensive preparation. Without agreements on alert postures or direct communication, signal decoding itself becomes a tension multiplier. Military history teaches that perceived vulnerability or advantage can trigger uncontrollable spirals. In South Asia, this dynamic is magnified by structural asymmetries in strategic decision-making. Pakistan’s power architecture—centralized under the military-dominated National Command Authority (NCA)—grants the army autonomous strategic latitude, as illustrated by the 1999 Kargil operation launched without Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s full coordination. India, conversely, relies on a civilian-military hierarchy where the National Security Council and political executive retain final authority, as seen in the tightly controlled 2019 Balakot surgical strikes. This command contrast sustains a thick strategic fog: India calibrates signals under political oversight, while Pakistan’s unpredictability heightens misinterpretation risks.
This divergence stems from power imbalances. Doctrines reflect real and perceived capabilities. The imbalance between India’s conventional superiority and Pakistan’s asymmetric logic shapes their strategic choices.
Militarily, India holds clear dominance. With 1.4 million troops, 4,200+ tanks (T-90, Arjun Mk1), 680+ combat aircraft (Su-30MKI, Rafale), and a carrier- and nuclear-submarine equipped navy, its operational nuclear triad underscores conventional-nuclear synergy. Pakistan, with 650,000 personnel, leans on pre-emptive deterrence. Its 160-warhead arsenal, Nasr/Shaheen-II/Ghauri missiles, and deliberately ambiguous ‘first-use’ doctrine aim to offset conventional inferiority. However, this opacity, intended as a form of deterrence, increases the risk of misinterpretation. Islamabad’s hybrid reliance on non-state actors further destabilizes. Threshold breaches thus hinge not just on political intent but on how asymmetrically each side reads adversarial capabilities.
This doctrinal rift, rooted in asymmetric power and threat perceptions, reflects not just divergent deterrence philosophies but clashing cognitive frameworks. As doctrines grow flexible and less verifiable, strategic signal management frays, heightening misread risks. It is within this grey zone, both doctrinal and psychological, that South Asia’s deterrence architecture now encounters its most critical vulnerabilities. Amid strategic uncertainty, alliances gain critical importance. Beyond mere military pacts, they reshape power balances through regional influence, tech transfers, and containment strategies. India has built a strategic network transcending traditional partnerships to counterbalance China. As a Quad member (with the U.S., Japan, and Australia), it bolsters Indo-Pacific posture, complemented by defence ties with France (Scorpène submarines, Rafales) and Israel (drones, cyber, and missile defence). This tech-sharing, strategy-aligned architecture enhances India’s geopolitical depth and conventional deterrence against hybrid threats. Pakistan remains anchored to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Belt and Road Initiative’s crown jewel. Beyond granting China Indian Ocean access via Gwadar, CPEC traverses Gilgit-Baltistan—a region India claims as part of Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi views CPEC as a territorial provocation and Sino-Pakistani entrenchment. Islamabad also nurtures ties with Turkey, Iran, and Gulf states, blending security, ideology, and regionalism.
Moreover, Pakistan’s security posture no longer confines itself to defensive deterrence or operations within its borders. In 2024, Pakistani airstrikes conducted in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Khost, reportedly in response to alleged jihadist incursions, marked a doctrinal shift toward asserting extraterritorial strike capabilities. These operations, justified by a perceived threat and executed without prior regional coordination, set a troubling precedent.
However, the Bajwa Doctrine, led by former Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa, aimed to prioritise economic stabilisation and regional integration, all while maintaining the military’s dominant influence over national policy. Despite framing economic partnerships (e.g., China, Gulf states) as tools to reduce India-centric rivalry, it failed to transform core conflict dynamics. Pakistan’s military retains control over Kashmir and nuclear policy, perpetuating distrust. While conciliatory rhetoric emerged, armed tensions persist, exposing economic initiatives’ inability to override territorial, identity, and security drivers. This modernisation security rigidity underscores hybrid strategy limits, where historical fractures and strategic calculus still trump de-escalation.
In short, Indian and Pakistani military doctrines embody antithetical deterrence visions. India’s ‘massive retaliation’ doctrine clings (officially) to no-first-use; Pakistan’s ‘first-use’ posture banks on ambiguity as a stabiliser. This gap raises persistent questions: How far will India stretch deterrence? How does Pakistan interpret limited incursions?
In this unstable deterrence architecture, nuclear weapons act as uncertainty multipliers, exacerbated by decision-making dynamics. Pakistan’s current Army Chief, General Asim Munir, embodies a more offensive line, contrasting with past military caution. Even limited Indian incursions could be seen as justifying tactical nuclear use. Absent bilateral de-escalation channels or strategic off-ramps, unpredictability grows. Meanwhile, external powers (U.S., China, the UN) remain passive, urging restraint without crisis mediation.
Doctrinal Dangers and Strategic Imbalances
In the Indo-Pakistani strategic landscape, nuclear doctrines are neither static nor symmetrical. They are shaped by a structural imbalance that drives each actor to offset its vulnerabilities through flexible and, at times, ambiguous postures. India, bolstered by its conventional military superiority, upholds a doctrine of massive retaliation paired with an official no-first-use policy. Pakistan, by contrast, has developed a doctrine in response to India’s military advantage, designed to neutralise any conventional incursion at its earliest stage. This asymmetry creates an unstable doctrinal space in which the nuclear threshold is neither shared nor stabilised nor even mutually understood. This dynamic is precisely what Vipin Narang describes when analysing asymmetric nuclear deterrence strategies. According to him, the militarily weaker actor tends to adopt a more aggressive doctrinal posture, deliberately lowering its nuclear threshold to bolster the credibility of its deterrence. However, such asymmetry undermines crisis management, as the more ambiguous and preemptive a doctrine becomes, the higher the risk of provoking an overreaction from the adversary.Thus, several strategic trajectories could emerge from the current climate of tension, each carrying distinct implications for regional and global stability. One potential outcome involves a phase of managed escalation that, through restrained confrontation and backchannel diplomacy, ultimately reverts to a fragile but familiar status quo. Another possibility is the evolution of a prolonged hybrid crisis, marked by intermittent skirmishes, disinformation campaigns, and cyber operations that keep both sides in a state of persistent confrontation without crossing into full-scale war. In a region where strategic doctrines are opaque and thresholds remain ill-defined, even a minor misstep could unravel existing deterrence frameworks and propel South Asia, and potentially the wider international community, into a crisis of unprecedented scale and uncertainty.
Therefore, in light of these destabilising trajectories, the need for robust de-escalation mechanisms becomes more urgent than ever. Establishing reliable communication channels, enhancing transparency in doctrinal intentions, and promoting confidence-building measures are not merely diplomatic niceties but essential tools to prevent inadvertent catastrophe. Without such safeguards, the Indo-Pakistani rivalry risks becoming a perpetual crisis engine, where ambiguity fuels brinkmanship and restraint becomes the exception rather than the norm.
Ultimately, the region serves as a stark reminder that in the nuclear age, even so-called “frozen” conflicts can ignite with devastating consequences, and history repeats itself only until it spirals out of control. Preventing catastrophe now requires a bold overhaul of trust-building mechanisms, ideally through multilateral mediation involving actors such as the United Nations, Nordic countries, or ASEAN. In parallel, advancing economic interdependence through initiatives like cross-border solar grids and cooperative water management could help generate shared interests and raise the cost of conflict to prohibitive levels. While these measures may seem ambitious, they are far less utopian than the alternative—a scenario of uncontrolled escalation in which opaque doctrines and entrenched hostilities erode the very foundations of deterrence.
Given these realities, it is imperative to stress that, without shared doctrinal frameworks, Indo-Pak deterrence ceases to be a safeguard. It becomes a trap. In asymmetric rivalries, it is not the weapon that triggers war but the illusion of controlling it.
In South Asia’s nuclear geometry, deterrence is no longer a stabiliser; it is a shifting mirage. And in a world where perception moves faster than diplomacy, miscalculation is not a possibility. It is a countdown.
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